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At the time
of his death, Uncle Oscar was 35 years of age, a California native who was born
in Santa Rosa. Having been born in 1857, he missed having made the long ride on
the Beaver-Cockrill wagon train from Missouri in 1853 which my grandfather,
Francis Marion Beaver, age 2, had taken.
All of
his life Uncle Oscar had heard tales of this journey from six other brothers
and sisters -- the nights camped among circled wagons, campfires glowing, the
sounds of the horses' stamping feet and the soft lowing of cattle mingled with
the distant barking of coyotes, the hot, thirsty days with thoughts only of the
next water hole, and the pesky but exciting Indians riding horseback on the
ridges of surrounding hills, too cautious to attack the occupants of 35 covered
wagons.
I first became aware that Uncle Oscar
had been a member of our family when I was 6 years old. It was a day when I
stood pondering the meaning of a blown-up framed picture depicting a casket
almost obscured by a huge bank of white flowers. Darker colored flowers in the
center were arranged so as to spell "Rest Oscar."
Children in those days in the West were taken to
funerals with the same nonchalance as they were taken to church or to picnics.
Occasions for excitement were infrequent and funeral were more than the burial
of the dead -- they were orgies of hysterical grief-display where grownups blew
their noses, hugged, leaned against one another and wailed.
For me, at 6 years of age, funerals accented an
awesome mystery of life. One went to church to learn about God, and went to
funerals to learn that there must not be a God. So, with the eerie overtones of
emotional half-meaning that only a child can have, I sadly sensed that behind
this bank of flowers lay the body of a family member and that around the casket
there had been, sometime, a tearful family reunion.
I inquired of my mother the meaning of the picture and
I heard for the first time the names of Evans and Sontag, bandits in the San
Joaquin Valley during the early part of the 1890's. The incident of Uncle
Oscar's violent death had taken place 20 years earlier in Visalia, California.
The year was 1892 and my mother was a very small girl. Uncle Oscar was my
mother's uncle, my grandfather's youngest brother.
All through my early life, at family gatherings, I
would hear new bits of information of the tragic incident that took Uncle
Oscar's life. So by the time I was grown a visual image had formed in my mind
of that fateful day in August, so real that I could describe Chris Evans'
house, the garden with its tomato plants, corn, beans and fig trees in the
yard, the picket fence which surrounded it all, and the barnyard and corral
where the shotgun battle had taken place.
Then
there came a time, when I was about 21 years of age, that I had occasion to
visit Aunt Jennie, Uncle Oscar's widow. She now was in her 70s and had long
since remarried and lived in a huge two-story Victorian house, near Lemoore
surrounded by lush vineyards and towing walnut and pecan trees. We had spent a
couple of lingering hours at the breakfast table discussing old times in which
the circumstances of Uncle Oscar's death became the leading part.
She showed me a newspaper clipping she had saved
showing Chris Evan's picture and telling the story of his being paroled by
Governor Hiram Johnson in 1917, a sick and broken old man having served, since
1894, a prison term in Folsom. It told of the last years of his life with his
family and his recent death.
Suddenly Aunt
Jennie arose from the table and said "Please come with me, I want to show you
something." I followed her up a long stairway accommodating a high-ceilinged
living room and down a dark hallway. I had the feeling that this was a rare
occasion and that it happened only upon her studied discretion and only with
those with whom she had meant to share something of her deepest
sentiments.
After all, I was a grand-nephew of
her late husband and my youthfulness may have stirred memories that brought a
past event of 35 years back to life. She stopped in front of a door and paused
a moment, took a deep breath and slowly turned the knob and entered. In the
manner of one careful to avoid disturbing the repose of another, she turned to
me and whispered, "Come in, this is your Uncle Oscar's room."
Stepping into the room, I walked into California's
1890s and something of a subliminal prologue to my own life. Uncle Oscar's
clothes and other personal effects, pictures on the wall, his guns and all the
other things that make a man's room what it is, were all appropriately arranged
much in the way they could have been on his last day in this world. The only
article which might have seemed out of place was a suit coat, vest and
trousers, which Aunt Jennie had said, was what he was wearing that day. It hung
on the wall above he bed.
There were tears in
her eyes when she pointed out to me the buckshot holes in the vest. She told me
that he had seemed to have a kind of premonition a few days before he had been
summoned as deputy sheriff to help in the manhunt in Tulare County. He had
given prolonged attention to his 5-year-old son when he bade him goodnight and
tucked him into bed.
To many, if not most young
people, all that is past is passé and only the present is real. And I
was very young. But despite my youth and this tendency to give life and meaning
only to the present. I felt a presence in that room -- the past was strangely
alive. Could it be a vibration one feels, a kind of cerebral correspondence
with persons and events which have passed out of the visible human story?
The story of Evans and Sontag constitutes a very small
part of California history. Still the episode is remembered as having furnished
the nearly one million inhabitants of California with its major excitement for
two years and evoked a mild interest across the nation. Depth implications were
impossible to draw from the event at the time, for the reason that passions
which cried out for vengeful release could not be sure of moral
sanctions.
The old California was dying away and
the new was not yet born: the state was mesmerized by its own moral
uncertainty. Had it not been for the murders involved, Evans and Sontag might
still be regarded as heroes. But California by now was sick of murders.
Historians have consistently bypassed critical
judgments of the affair and have floundered along with that scientific
objectivity which allows meaning to die in pathos. But the years have a classic
way of writing their own judgments into human affairs, and it just may be that
meaning can only arise from the pathos of judgmental surrender.
Almost by accident and by a circumstance stirred to
life by a triviality did Evans and Sontag become involved as declared suspects
and then as hunted outlaws. And after the excitement of many months was over,
the populace lost its passion for a cause, shrugged its shoulders and left the
search for condolence to the families of the dead and to Chris Evans'
absent-father family.
The roots of this story
spread deep and far into that geographic and cultural phenomenon which is
California. Individualism is its chief characteristic. Individualism: a desire
to be free from social complications, a desire for self-determination, and a
desire to be a part of open-ended opportunity. When individualism is in its
adolescence, we are sometimes appalled by its thrashing impotence and its power
to host social and moral tragedy. Yet no adolescent is all adolescent: he is
also a noble man if he has room enough and inspiration enough to allow
it.
Then, too, adolescence is the river in which
you cannot put your foot in the same place twice; for adolescence is a
procession, a condition that swallows itself and proceeds not knowing whither
it came from nor whither it goes--leaving-its turbulence to other adolescents
who are bound to believe that all this has never happened before to
anyone.
But where did this story really begin?
Did it begin with the first migration of Indians to California from the Great
Basin of the Midwest? Hardly. For the Indians of California flubbed their
cosmic opportunity and waited in dirty little villages until another kind of
man, intent upon adventure, came along.
For in
the time of Christ, Indian villages clustered around what is now called San
Francisco Bay and throughout the great valleys, and 1800 years later their
villages were still dirty and the inhabitants were still eating raw fish,
acorns and grasshoppers. According to the white man's thinking, the California
Indians never reached their adolescence.
Did it
begin with the coming of the Spaniards, the Russians, and the British -- all of
whom nibbled on the prospect of manifest destiny? No, for it took the Americans
to make destiny manifest.
Indians almost began
with the trappers who slogged over the mountains in the 1800s, with Fremont and
others, pathfinders in the 1840s, and with the massive migration of Americans
seeking gold and land and independence in the 1850s.
But the outline of adolescent individualism in the far
West began to become apparent in California's history when opportunity began to
involve the interdependence of people in a new society. It was a new society
because it was isolated from its parent-society by 2,000 miles of formidable
mountains, vast deserts and hostile elements. It had no choice but to being
from scratch where it was with whatever ethical and spiritual disciplines it
had brought along with it. So all of mankind's deposit of weaknesses and
strengths, defeats, and victories, was this new society's stark
resources.
In a strict sense, this story begins
with four men with wheels in their heads and with their genius to produce
railroads. They created the Central Pacific Railroad Company and maneuvered to
establish a monopoly which soon came to dominate transportation in the port of
San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento Valley. With the employment of hordes of
Chinese laborers and with huge government subsidies, they pushed their way
through and over the High Sierra where, at Promontory, Utah in 1869, Governor
Stanford drove the golden spike which joined West with East.
The Central Pacific Railroad bought and absorbed the
smaller Southern Pacific Railroad and this merger in time was known only as the
Southern Pacific Company. And now we know the name of "the octopus." Its
founders and directors believed in individualism: their names were Stanford,
Huntington, Hopkins and Crocker.
With the wealth
they had grasped in Northern California, they set out to dominate
transportation in the entire state. This they did. But not only did they
control transportation, they controlled the state government and its finances.
In other words, they did as they pleased for themselves in the interests of
providing the state with transportation.
Up
until the coming of the railroad, farming in the San Joaquin Valley had been
largely experimental and tentative. Then with transportation and irrigation the
San Joaquin became one of the greatest grain-producing areas of the world. Much
of the land producing this grain had been given by the government as a subsidy
to the railroad and the railroad had induced settlers to take and develop it
with the promise that when certain legal matters were settled it would be sold
to them for as low as $2.50 and acre.
After the
farmers had spent years developing the land and building their homes, the
railroad changed its mind. In numerous instances the price which was later
demanded forced the farmers off the land. Up and down the valley intense
bitterness developed and with the railroad controlling state government and
having lobbyists in Washington there was no recourse. The farmers were
helpless. From within this hopeless stalemate there exploded what is known in
California history as the "Mussel Slough Massacre" in 1880.
About 10 years after the Mussel Slough tragedy, and
long before it had been forgotten, there were a series of train robberies in
the central San Joaquin Valley. The first ones were about a year apart, giving
delicious time between episodes to allow the inhabitants of the valley to savor
the last drop of vengeance their fenced-in feelings. The robberies were daring
and violent, and their destructiveness was costly to the railroad. Railroad
detectives were out in droves gathering up suspects.
In a frantic effort to arrest and convict the
culprits, the railroad detectives created a comic opera for the entire state.
The Dalton boys, who happened to be in California at the time, were suspected,
jailed, and harassed. Grat Dalton, convicted of a robbery, broke out of jail in
Visalia and escaped.
As an aside to this story
I am tempted to follow Grat Dalton a little way after his escape. He "borrowed"
a wagon and team of horses, hitched to a rail by the courthouse -- while their
owner was in a prayer meeting -- and made off in search of better
transportation. Somewhere he exchanged the team for a saddle horse and the team
was found in Tulare the next day. This was good, for Grat had gone the other
way. Come the next Sunday, he was hiding out in his cousin's home in Kingsburg,
30 miles north of Visalia.
It happened that my
grandfather was an acquaintance of old man Oldham, Grat's cousin, and Sunday
was a day for visiting friends. And my father, aged 10, went along on this
particular Sunday. I have always cherished my father's story of this occasion:
"It's all right, Grat," said old man Oldham, peeking out the crack of the open
door, "It's only friends."
Before a year had
passed, Grat Dalton and others of the boys had died in the famous bank robbery
battle in Coffeeville, Kansas.
On August 3,
1892, train number 17, enroute from San Francisco to Los Angeles, was held up
at Collis (Kerman) near Fresno and the express car was robbed. The engine was
dynamited and badly damaged. The express messenger was forced to help carry the
sacks of gold and silver coin to a waiting wagon where there was an instant
getaway. After an hour's delay in repairing the engine, the train crawled on
into Fresno where the news was telegraphed to all points of the state. The next
day railroad detectives were again on the valley scene.
Just after day break the next morning. Chris Evans and
John Sontag drove a team and small wagon into Evan's yard, a mile north of
Visalia, and unloaded a few things at the barn. Then they returned the rented
team to the stable in Visalia -- at about eight o'clock -- and remained
downtown awhile. It was then that they heard the first news of the train
robbery. Sometime the same morning, George Sontag, John's brother, arrived on
the train from Fresno.
Acting on evidence
obtained from investigations of a previous train robbery, railroad detective
Will Smith also arrived by train from Fresno. It was his intention to make the
acquaintance of Chris Evans and the Sontag brothers with the purpose of getting
information which might lead to evidence involving them in the train robbery.
With this in mind, Smith sidled up alongside of Evans as he strolled down a
Visalia street and engaged him in casual conversation. Naturally, he didn't
find out much but he did learn that the Sontag brothers were staying in the
home of Evan's mother-in-law, Mrs. Byrd, who lived next door to the
Evans'.
John Sontag had come from Minnesota a
couple of years before he had worked on the railroad in the San Joaquin Valley.
An accident in Fresno involving two freight cars and his left lower leg sent
him to the Southern Pacific Hospital in Sacramento. He remained in the hospital
several weeks and was discharged from railroad responsibility long before he
was able to work. He had solicited any kind of work from the main office of the
railroad which would allow him to make a living and was dismissed with curses
and sneers.
He had become extremely embittered
and wandered about looking for work, railing upon the injustices of the
Southern Pacific. In this mood he met Chris Evans one day on the street of
Visalia. The two men had something in common which involved strong and deep
feelings -- for Chris Evans had his own reason for despising the Southern
Pacific.
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